Teri nodded, ashamed to admit it.
“Me, too,” Cindy said. “About three years ago. I woke up one morning and realized I just couldn't go on living like that. It never stopped. I was always checking faces, hoping and praying that I'd find him riding his bike on the sidewalk or playing catch at the park. He was always the next face, the next phone call. I just couldn't handle it anymore.”
A deep breath filled her lungs, slowly escaped again, and it was as if she had just emptied herself of a lifetime of shame. She put aside the wine glass, and smiled weakly. “I'm glad you came by.”
“I'm glad I did, too.”
For a moment, it seemed there was nothing left to talk about. It was strangely out of place to think of bringing up the old days now. They had died a death of their own, Teri supposed. Long before either of the boys had disappeared.
“I'm not going to drop it,” Teri said finally.
“You know they're dead, though. After all these years.”
She nodded slightly, hating herself because she knew Gabe wasn't dead and she didn't like playing the charade. At the same time, though, she didn't want to risk getting Cindy's hopes up, either. There was no way of knowing for sure if Cody was alive or not. It had been ten years now. Gabe had come home, Cody hadn't. The thought of anyone having to go through the pain of losing her child twice was more than Teri could stomach. She didn't want to be responsible for that kind of pain. She didn't want to fuel the flames only to have to smother them again later.
“I'd still like to know,” Teri said.
“I guess I would, too.”
[81]
After awhile, the conversation drifted into private thoughts, and Teri finally made an effort to excuse herself. She was late for a meeting, she said, and even though it had been great seeing Cindy again, she had better get moving.
Cindy walked her to the door. “Like I said, I'm glad you came by.”
“Maybe we can have lunch sometime?”
“That would be nice. I'd like that.”
There was one more thing Teri needed to ask. The answer was already a given, she assumed, but she wanted to make certain anyway. “Oh, before I go, I was wondering something.”
“What's that?”
“I was wondering if Dr. Childs happened to be your doctor?”
“Yes,” Cindy said. “Why?”
“Oh, I just found out he had a practice up here, and I was thinking about switching, that's all.” Teri stepped outside, onto the porch and appreciated the warmth of the sun slanting in against her back. “Was he Cody's doctor, too?”
“Yes. Since birth.”
[82]
There was only one person aware of the procession, and he was at the very back, driving a Mercury and chewing on a toothpick. He pulled into traffic, the fourth of four cars, finding the idea of this being a scene out of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World amusing enough to bring a smile to his face. This car following that one, that car following the one in front and finally, here he was at the very back, following them all. Definitely amusing.
There was one vehicle with which he was unfamiliar – the car directly in front of him. It had California plates, and he had already put in a trace. The information would be coming back shortly, and that would probably be enough to place the guy in some sort of context. In the meantime, he supposed it was most likely Michael Knight, the woman's husband. Word was out that the guy was back in town again.
In the middle of the procession, of course, was Mitchell Wolfe. Now there was a pathetic excuse for a man. Divorced. No kids. Never kept a non-military job in his life. Basically a screw-up. The kind of guy who needs to be told how to take a piss or he'll never unzip his pants. Dangerous, though. He was one of those thrill-seeking types who enjoyed finding himself in a pot full of boiling danger. Thrived on it, in fact.
And then at the very front, little miss Knight herself.
What a fucking line-up, the man thought.
He thought back to It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World again, at the very beginning when Jimmy Durante takes in his last breath, dies, then literally kicks the bucket (which goes bouncing off one rock after another all the way down the canyon wall). What a scream!
What a scream, indeed.
[83]
The car windows were rolled down a couple of inches on both the driver's side and the passenger's side. There was a cool, gentle breeze drifting through, and still it felt stuffy, almost muggy inside. Walt rolled his window down further and tried to settle into a new position that wasn't so uncomfortable. He leaned back against the door and stretched his legs across the front seat. It felt good to move his muscles.
The car was parked on a side street, adjacent to the small parking lot at the back of the good doctor's clinic. Walt had called earlier on the pretext of bringing in his son, who, he said, had fallen out of a tree in the backyard and may have broken his arm. Yes, Dr. Childs was in. Yes, they could probably squeeze the boy in for x-rays sometime after three. But if it appeared at all serious, he should consider taking his son to the emergency room at Glenn General.
Nearly three hours had dragged by since then.
It was getting late.
Walt flipped on the radio, listened to fifteen or twenty seconds of the local news, then flipped it off again. The thing that had been bothering him since his meeting with Aaron was this: why? If this Mitchell character was freelancing for the CIA, then why was he interested in Gabe? How on earth could an eleven-year-old kid do anything that would matter to the CIA? And if Mitchell wasn't working with the CIA, then who in the hell was he working for?
Across the street, the back door of the clinic opened.
Walt sat up.
Two women stepped out into the dim halogen light over the parking lot. Childs followed close behind. He locked the door, and the three of them chatted casually on their way out to their cars. The women were apparently pooling, because the one dressed in a white nurse's uniform climbed into the driver's side, and her companion climbed in and sat across from her. Childs started up his own car, the engine sounding sticky, and began to back out. As the others drove off, he stuck his arm out the window and waved good night to them.
At the street, before finally turning west, he seemed to debate which direction he wanted to take. It was a couple of minutes before six. Twilight had begun to lower its dark blanket over the landscape. Childs moved out of the parking lot apparently in no particular hurry.
“And we're off,” Walt said to himself.
He started up the car, pulled out into the street, and followed along a block or so behind. Not only was Childs in no particular hurry, he seemed to go out of his way to take a number of back streets. He stayed just above the speed limit, backing off only once when a patrol car passed going the other direction.
What a wuss, Walt thought.
There was a short stop at the Holiday Market, and Childs came out pushing a cart with two bags of groceries. By the time the doctor finally arrived home, it was a quarter past six.
Walt parked across the street. He took down the license plate number of the doctor's Buick, and made a note of the street address. It was getting late now. He had promised to meet Teri at the apartment at six. Although that was already a lost cause, he didn't want to make it any worse. The last time he had been late to meet her... well, that had turned into something of a disaster, hadn't it?
“Home again, home again,” he said out loud, haplessly.
He hoped Teri had had better luck than him.
[84]
Forty-five minutes later, after a Swanson Hungry Man dinner of chicken, corn and mashed potatoes, Childs emerged from his house, carrying his briefcase. Twilight had surrendered to the wholeness of night. The stars were out in full force, unspoiled by the usual haze hovering over the cityscape. A sliver of moon shone above the distant mountains like an afterthought to a perfect sky.
He stopped at the corner of the garage and gazed up to the heavens, amazed at how beautiful and infinite the ni
ght could be. Sometimes it was frightening to think how small and insignificant we human beings really were. For a moment, he wondered if we had any real control over our lives at all, or if we were simply puppets acting out a scripted tale of life and death.
Not without a fight, he thought.
He threw the briefcase in the back seat of the Buick, backed out of the driveway, and thirty minutes later, only a few miles away, he pulled into the parking lot of the Devol Research Institute.
[85]
Lunch hadn't settled well with Mitch. He had pulled into a small Mexican drive-through and ordered himself a couple of tacos and a burrito, and they had gone down just fine. But as the day had worn on, they had begun to come back at him.
He went out to the car and rummaged through the glove compartment until he came up with an old box of Mylanta II Chewables buried under a map. The doctor had recommended them after a long bout with stomach acid. Mitch had gone in worried that he was having some sort of gallbladder problem, but much to his relief it had only been a bad case of gastritis.
He closed the glove compartment, sat back in the seat, and popped two of the tablets into his mouth. They were dry and powdery, and left a funny taste that wasn't much different from the taste this day had left. It had not been a good day.
Around noon, Travis had driven the Knight woman down to a small car rental place off Cypress. They had parted company shortly thereafter, and Mitch had stayed with the woman throughout the entire day. She had not seemed like the cornered, dangerous mother D.C. had painted her to be. Instead, she had done something Mitch's grandmother used to do: she had gone visiting. When Mitch had been growing up, his grandmother had often taken him visiting. She would take him to see how the Matthews were doing, and maybe take some fresh baked bread over to Molly Jenkins, or drop off some quilting material at Miss Winter's, who had never married. It was one place of visiting after another, morning till night. As that little boy, Mitch had been just as bored tagging along with his grandmother as he had been bored tagging along with the Knight woman today.
The two tablets finally disintegrated.
Mitch locked the car up, and headed toward the laundry room where there was a Coke machine in the corner next to the utility closet. In two days, he had learned his way around this apartment complex far better than he had ever intended. It was quiet here, not much coming and going. Most of the renters were middle-class working stiffs, who put in their eight hours then came home and plopped down in front of the television set.
The Coke machine was out of Cokes, so he got himself a Sprite instead. He guzzled down half of it in a single tug, washing away the chalky film that coated his mouth from the Mylanta tablets. A huge belch came up from the depths, and instantly his stomach began to feel better.
Outside the laundry room, he paused long enough to finish the Sprite then toss the can into a nearby flower box. The Travis apartment was upstairs, across the commons. Mitch made his way around the outer edges, silently hoping Travis and his guest would retire early tonight so he could get back to the motel before Letterman. Across the way, a woman yelled to her husband that dinner was on. The husband yelled back that he was in the bathroom and he'd be out when he was done doing his business.
Then surprisingly, out of nowhere it seemed, Walter Travis came strolling around the corner.
“Evening,” Mitch said.
“Evening.”
The two men passed, Travis barely glancing up from his thoughts. Mitch turned and watched him climb the stairs. It had never occurred to him before, but suddenly he found himself wondering about the man's relationship with the Knight woman.
Boyfriend, he decided. Has to be a boyfriend.
Mitch stopped at the corner, leaned against the wall and stared up at the apartment window. The lights were on in both the kitchen and the living room. Like it or not, he had the feeling that tonight was going to be another long one. He took out his notebook, marked down the time, and noted that W. Travis had just arrived home.
[86]
By the time Walt arrived at the apartment it was thirty-five minutes after six and he was feeling appropriately guilty about being late yet a second time. He closed the door behind him, and immediately saw Teri sitting on the couch in the living room. The sight brought him a quick exhale of relief. At least she was home, alive and well.
“Sorry I'm late.”
She looked up. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face streaked. She sniffled, touched a handkerchief to her nose, and tried on a smile that was part embarrassment, part surrender.
“What's the matter? What happened?” Walt sat next to her on the couch, and she melted into his arms, her body an emotional wafer in danger of crumbling. He held her and did his best to comfort her, feeling all the while hopelessly inadequate.
“I'm sorry,” she said eventually, wiping her eyes with the crumpled tissue.
“No need,” he said. “So what happened?”
A sad smile passed across her lips, then quickly disappeared again. “He wasn't the only one, Walt. Gabe wasn't the only one.”
“The only one?”
“There was another boy. I went to see some of my old friends today, like we talked about.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And one of them, Cindy Breswick, she had a son by the name of Cody, who was a little younger than Gabe. This was the first I'd ever heard about it. I didn't even know Cindy had a little boy. And then today she told me that she had lost him. He had just disappeared one day.” Teri's eyes began to fill with tears again. “And ... and I asked her about it ... and she told me how he'd just gone across the street to play ... and ... and he had never come home again. Just like Gabe.”
“When was this?” Walt asked.
“That's the scary part. Both boys ... they both turned up missing in the same month. March of '85. The same month. Both of them.”
“Cody Breswick,” he said, remembering.
“You knew, didn't you?”
“I'd almost forgotten,” he said honestly. “But, yes, we knew.”
“Why didn't you do anything?”
“We did the best we could at the time, Teri. Believe me, no one took it lightly. We had a huge debate in the department about whether or not there was any kind of a link between the two cases. It was just that most of us—and I admit, I was one of them—felt there just wasn't enough evidence to make that connection.”
“Didn't anyone think it was a little unusual? Two boys in the same month?”
“Of course we did. That's why we had the debate.”
She shook her head in disbelief. She had stopped crying now, and he could see that she had managed to replace her tears with something a little closer to anger. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though he would have found it a little more palatable if the anger weren't directed at him.
“We might have solved this thing years ago, do you realize that? I mean, who knows how many other children might have been saved?”
It was a good point, one that Walt tried not to think too long about. There were some things in life you simply couldn't change. It didn't matter how much you wished you could, once the card had been turned it was yours. This card had been a particularly painful one. They had missed an important link, and it might very well have cost some children their lives.
“Jesus, Walt, I trusted you!”
“We just didn't know,” he said quietly. His throat tightened, and when he swallowed it was as if he were swallowing a lump of burning coal. “There were two others after Gabe and Cody.”
“What?”
“A couple of weeks later. The same thing. They went out to play and never came home again.”
“I can't believe this.”
“The department soft-pedaled it. They were afraid things would get out of hand, that people would panic and vigilante groups would start popping up everywhere. Some innocent people were going to get killed if that happened. And no one wanted that. So the department kept the wraps on the second two disappea
rances.”
“They didn't do any investigating at all?”
“Of course they did. They just kept it quiet. They put together a task force of – I can't remember exactly, but I think there were eleven, maybe twelve detectives. And there was nothing to go on, Teri. These guys worked around the clock for the next six months, and they couldn't come up with anything. Not a license plate number. Not a witness. Nothing.”
“And no connection between the boys?”
“No,” Walt said regretfully. “I'm sorry.”
She nodded. “So am I.”
They both fell silent for a time after that. Teri stared vacantly out the window, across the city lights, into the darkness beyond. She had stopped crying, and Walt didn't think she was still angry with him. But she was mournful—they were both mournful—and that wasn't going to go away for a good long time.
[87]
He came crawling up out of the depths like a salamander out from beneath a rock. His eyes fluttered open, caught a faint glimmer of light, and shut again. In that glimpse, he realized he didn't know this place, and he didn't know what he was doing here.
A sound came up from his throat, raw and dry.
He rolled onto his side.
A deep, spiraling soreness dug into the muscles of his legs, feeling—oddly enough—both good and bad at the same time. It made him momentarily aware of its presence, like a knock at the door, and then the soreness gradually evaporated as if it were a visitor who couldn't stay.
Somewhere far away, a rhythm tried to draw him even further out of his sleep. He listened to it, briefly, wondering what it was that made a sound like that. Then bit by bit it slipped away from him and he found himself drifting back into the silence that had already kept him for so long.
It was safer here, more comfortable.
No bright lights.
No loud noises.
Just peacefulness.
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